Science versus religion. Usually, they butt heads. Galileo said Earth rotated around the Sun, not vice versa. That claim sure pissed off the Church. Ultimately, the Church had to own up to the truth, and they rightly did so -- in 1981. However, the fight between Galileo and the Church was not over science versus The Bible; instead, it was a fight between Copernican astronomy and Aristotelean astronomy, an argument over what is.

When the arguement concerns what was or will be, or when The Bible itself is challenged, the arguments reach their typical impasse. Recently, scientists have discovered (confirming past hypotheses) that chimps share 99.4% of their genetics with humans. Now, there is a movement to put chimps in the same genus as humans, "homo." (Quit giggling.) This finding, though telling, cannot truly prove that humans and chimps are evolutionarily linked. Nothing but a time machine or God could actually prove where we came from. Therefore, if you're life is based on the The Bible as infallible truth, this finding proves nothing.

Emperical evidence, no matter how overwhelming, can always be punctured by whoever wants to puncture it. A good example is the struggle between those who believe and those who disbelieve in global warming.

Despite sharing nearly our entire genetic makeup with chimps, not to mention a passing resemblance, there's still no way to definitively prove we are evolutionarily related to them, despite the overwhelming evidence that we are super-smart chimps as opposed to having been made by God (Genesis 1:26).

Galileo cited Cardinal Baronius in his defense: "The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." Thus it should be with all of science.

Finally, I'll leave you with some irony: Gregor Mendel, whose research helped define the the science of genetics, was a monk.